Carl Sagan

“I am not sure how to put this post across to people with framed mind. I am not sure how to convince people that we live in a fragile little speck. I am not sure how to influence extremists with communal harmony or reach out to religious heads and show them the reality of universe. But deep inside the faith of being the only intelligent creation must remain strong.”

The pale blue dot, that we live in must not tear apart on its own footprint. The pale blue dot that we call the only home, the oasis that we ever know, the realm that we thrive to dominate, the cocoon with no replacement, must be preserved because beyond this ‘pale blue dot’ we have nowhere else to go. As I read through the quotes of Carl Sagan carefully, I pose few questions to myself and every citizen of this blue marble:

” All the rage, the anger, the hatred, the fight for superiority, the fight for dominance, the clannish thoughts, the extremist thoughts; all the fame, the power, the class, the poverty – will these all help us find another home when the ‘pale blue dot’ exists no more?”

The pale blue dot– This is where we make our stand

Look again at that dot!

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us,

On it everyone you love, everyone you know,

everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions,

ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager,

every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,

every king and peasant, every young couple in love,

every mother and father, hopeful child,

inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals,

every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,”

every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants

of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner,

how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another,

how fervent their hatreds

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors

in glory and triumph,

they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturing, our imagined self-importance,

the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe,

are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness,

there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.

There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

Visit, yes. Settle, not yet.

Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,

and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known